Entrepreneurialism and Innovation in Democratic Societies

Author

Christina Lubinski

Copenhagen Business School

Biography

Christina Lubinski is a professor at Copenhagen Business School. She is the principal investigator of the Carlsberg Foundation–funded research group The Entrepreneurial Age: Rethinking Entrepreneurship in Society, which critically reviews the role of entrepreneurship as a discourse and model for social action.

Why entrepreneurship matters for democracy

Entrepreneurship is often celebrated as a driver of economic dynamism and innovation. In many contexts, however, the term has been used to describe more than a set of business practices. It offers a cultural and political ideal that shapes how institutions and citizens understand merit, risk, responsibility, and progress. When treated as moral virtues, however, entrepreneurial values can quietly reorganize public life by rewarding certain forms of agency while rendering other forms of contribution less visible or less valued.

The central claim here is that today’s dominant model of entrepreneurship often elevates individualism, disruption, and self-reliance while obscuring the institutional and social conditions that enable innovation in the first place. Beneath its empowering rhetoric, it can reproduce privilege, valorize speed over stability, and narrow the range of values that democratic societies reward.

The argument unfolds in four steps. It first distinguishes entrepreneurship from entrepreneurialism, explaining how entrepreneurial logic extends beyond markets into social life. It then examines the tensions that emerge when this logic is imported into democratic governance, education, and labor markets. Next, it explains why it is useful to treat entrepreneurialism explicitly as an ideology when diagnosing these shifts. Finally, it sketches practical ways to reconnect innovation within democratic norms.

From entrepreneurship to entrepreneurialism

Entrepreneurship usually refers to starting or growing a business, including activities like spotting opportunities, taking risks, and building new organizations. Entrepreneurialism, by contrast, is what happens when that business mindset becomes a general model for how people should live and how institutions should work. One definition describes entrepreneurialism as a social ideology that “extends entrepreneurial logic into social life, directing aspirations and actions toward the relentless pursuit of entrepreneurial ideals.”^[i] In this view, everyone is expected to think like an entrepreneur.

This ideological shift can be observed in everyday settings far beyond venture creation. Job seekers are encouraged to market themselves and to treat job insecurity as a chance to “pivot.” Universities and schools place growing emphasis on “hustle,” competition, and measurable impact. Public services are asked to behave like startups and do more with less, scale quickly, and prove value through metrics, even when their ultimate goals are stability, care, and equal access. In the process, innovation and disruption are celebrated, while structural inequality is reframed as a test of individual resilience.

In democratic societies, this can tilt the moral and political landscape. Entrepreneurialism elevates autonomy and risk-taking to be universal virtues; it tends to reward those who can afford to take risks while marginalizing work that is essential but not easily “entrepreneurial,” such as caregiving, public service, and collective organizing. It can also shift responsibility away from institutions, encouraging individual citizens to continually adapt rather than asking what public rules and safeguards are needed. Over time, structural insecurity is recast as a personal challenge, fostering what scholars call the “entrepreneurial self”: a citizen who must continuously optimize, adapt, and innovate.^[ii]

This shift reshapes the relationship between citizens and the state and between private initiative and public purpose. By celebrating the entrepreneur as a civic ideal, societies risk equating democratic vitality with market dynamism and overlooking the institutional frameworks that make both possible. These include public education and research funding that expand opportunity and social protections that enable risk-taking by cushioning people from the worst consequences of economic volatility. When the startup mindset becomes the default template for solving public problems, it changes how democratic decisions are made.

When the startup mindset shapes government and work

While entrepreneurialism does celebrate entrepreneurs, it also pushes a particular idea of innovation shaped by rapid experimentation, constant reinvention, and visible disruption. When this becomes the main yardstick for progress, it can clash with democratic governance, where legitimacy also depends on deliberation, continuity, and accountability.

Public institutions are especially affected. When policymakers and civil servants are urged to “think like entrepreneurs,” they are encouraged to treat public problems as entrepreneurship challenges. Albeit useful in some settings, this approach encourages a style of decision-making that prizes speed and measurable outputs over slower democratic tasks such as consultation, due process, and building durable consensus.

Over time, this strategy changes what counts as “good reform.” Innovation comes to mean reform itself, while prudence and accountability are recast as obstacles or inefficiencies. The same logic extends into the labor market, where gig work, project-based employment, and the normalization of precarity are framed as flexibility and freedom. It also shapes how societies design tax systems and debate the redistributive responsibilities of the state. Even in Europe’s social democracies, market-oriented ideals of competitiveness and deregulation have seeped into policymaking, constraining the space for collective welfare and public purpose.

These transformations reveal a deeper ideological convergence. Entrepreneurialism does not merely influence what governments do but also how democracy itself is imagined. Public life starts to resemble a competitive marketplace, where individuals and institutions are expected to compete for attention and funding and prove their value by showing visible results. This can be seen in the spread of challenge prizes, hackathons, and innovation labs that ask actors to pitch solutions, often privileging what is fast, scalable, and easy to measure. The same logic appears in performance dashboards, league tables, and pay-for-success contracting, where public goals are translated into metrics and competition, and success is framed as “what works fast” rather than what is legitimate, inclusive, or accountable. The risk is a style of governance that recasts democracy as a competitive marketplace instead of a participatory process. It prioritizes initiative and personal drive over institutional cooperation and public trust. Consequently, democratic governance risks becoming performative—a contest of innovation pitches rather than a forum for deliberation.

Recognizing entrepreneurialism as an ideology helps expose this transformation. It reveals how political actors and institutions increasingly rely on entrepreneurial rhetoric, such as “startup nation,” “hustle economy,” and “entrepreneurial citizen,” to legitimate reforms that transfer risk from collective to individual actors.^[iii] The entrepreneurial ideal thus serves as a moral compass, shaping how societies imagine progress.

Making the invisible visible: entrepreneurialism as ideology

Seeing entrepreneurialism as an ideology brings both clarity and leverage. Ideologies help people make sense of uncertainty and explain how the world works. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz stated, they act like “maps of problematic social reality.”^[iv] In that sense, entrepreneurialism responds to economic and institutional volatility by offering a reassuring remedy: disruption is renewal, and creativity the path forward. The outcome can be politics that repeatedly chase the next reform headline while neglecting the quieter work that keeps democratic societies fair and stable.

Entrepreneurialism’s power also comes from how it links personal worth to adaptability. It presents progress as endless self-reinvention: keep improving, keep pivoting, keep optimizing. That message can energize people, but it can also create a cycle of striving and self-blame. After layoffs or contract endings, people are urged to upskill, rebrand themselves, and treat disruption as an opportunity, often through activation policies, employability metrics, or professional platforms that reward constant self-promotion. When constraints (e.g., weak demand, care responsibilities, discrimination, and regional decline) limit options, the gap between the promised payoff and lived reality is easily internalized as individual failure (“I didn’t adapt fast enough”) rather than recognized as a collective challenge that calls for institutional support. When success becomes a moral duty and failure a personal flaw, democratic solidarity erodes. Citizens cease to demand structural reform and instead internalize economic risk as a personal burden, as seen in welfare-to-work approaches in parts of Europe that treat unemployment primarily as an individual employability problem.

From this perspective, the ideological dimensions of entrepreneurship are neither accidental nor benign. They are reinforced in education systems that teach entrepreneurial thinking as a universal skill, in policy frameworks that evaluate institutions through innovation metrics, and in public narratives that equate disruption with virtue. The challenge is not to abandon entrepreneurship but to democratize its logic so that innovation supports shared goals, distributes risk more fairly, and strengthens public trust rather than eroding it.

Aligning innovation with democratic rules

If entrepreneurship is to strengthen democracy rather than weaken it, societies first need to see entrepreneurialism as a set of norms about what counts as success and who should bear risk. Once those norms are visible, they can be debated and revised, opening several practical pathways at the level of policy and innovation ecosystems:

Stress-test institutions, not just ideas

Public institutions, universities, and funding agencies should examine their entrepreneurial frameworks.^[v] When efficiency targets and innovation metrics crowd out public accountability, democratic institutions risk mimicking corporate logic. Regular reviews or institutional audits can help identify when entrepreneurial language supports resilience and when it undermines legitimacy or trust.

Broaden entrepreneurship beyond the lone individual

Democratic renewal requires expanding entrepreneurship beyond heroic individuals. Cooperative enterprises, social innovation labs, community wealth-building efforts, and mission-driven ventures illustrate ways to innovate while sharing power and responsibility. Policies that encourage shared ownership, participatory governance, and long-term value creation can counterbalance the volatility of financialized entrepreneurialism.

Teach entrepreneurship as public-minded problem-solving

Entrepreneurship education should move beyond training people to hustle. Schools and universities can cultivate civic imagination and ask how to innovate with public purpose and ethical reflection.^[vi] Curricula can connect entrepreneurship to democratic values of deliberation, equality, and responsibility, so students learn not only how to build but also how to sustain what they build.

Protect deliberation and transparency in innovative governance

Policymakers should resist treating speed as a substitute for legitimacy. Innovation in governance must not bypass deliberative processes or transparency. Entrepreneurial approaches strengthen democracy only when embedded in inclusive decision-making and clear public oversight.

Together, these steps re-embed entrepreneurship in democratic structures that balance initiative with solidarity. Entrepreneurship can serve democracy, but only if democracy sets the terms.

Reclaiming entrepreneurial imagination

Entrepreneurialism has become one of the defining outlooks of our time. It can energize creativity and risk-taking, but it also reshapes civic norms and redistributes power, changing what societies reward, who is seen as responsible for hardship, and how power is distributed. The challenge for democratic societies is not to curtail entrepreneurship but to govern the broader ideology that has grown around it so that innovation serves collective ends rather than eroding them. By understanding entrepreneurialism as an ideology, scholars and policymakers can make its invisible assumptions visible, opening them to critique and reform. This approach enables the separation of entrepreneurship as a valuable source of dynamism from entrepreneurialism as a moral doctrine that can narrow democratic choices. The task ahead is to design institutions capable of channeling entrepreneurial energy toward democratic renewal and build public capacities that encourage experimentation while protecting accountability and inclusion.

[i] Christina Lubinski and Hannah K. Tucker, “Entrepreneurialism: Conceptual Exploration of an Ideology,” Entrepreneurship & Regional Development 38, no. 1-2 (2026), 1–17; Robert N. Eberhart, Stephen Barley, and Andrew Nelson, “Freedom is Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose: Entrepreneurialism and the Changing Nature of Employment Relations,” in Entrepreneurialism and Society: New Theoretical Perspectives, ed. Robert N. Eberhart, Michael Lounsbury, and Howard E. Aldrich, Research in the Sociology of Organizations (Emerald Publishing Limited, 2022), 13-41; Tim Weiss et al., “The Social Effects of Entrepreneurship on Society and Some Potential Remedies: Four Provocations,” Journal of Management Inquiry 32, no. 4 (2023), 251-277.

[ii] Ulrich Bröckling, The Entrepreneurial Self: Fabricating a New Type of Subject (Los Angeles: Sage, 2016); Carla Freeman, Entrepreneurial Selves: Neoliberal Respectability and the Making of a Caribbean Middle Class (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

[iii] Nicolai C. Jepsen and Lauren Eaton, “Hustle: A Conceptual Exploration of Work at the Margins,” Management & Organizational History 20, no. 3 (2025), 314–335; Lilly Irani, Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019); Silvia M. Lindtner, Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020).

[iv] Clifford Geertz, “Ideology as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, ed. Clifford Geertz (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 193-233, here: 220.

[v] Mikkel Holck Pedersen et al., “Ideology, Incompetence and Reflexivity in a University Incubator,” Scandinavian Journal of Management (2025), 101399.

[vi] R. Daniel Wadhwani and Christoph Viebig, “Social Imaginaries of Entrepreneurship Education: The United States and Germany, 1800-2020,” Academy of Management Learning & Education 20, no. 3 (2021), 342-360.